Remember in the film “Dead Poets Society” when all the students in Mr. Keating’s English class stood up on their desks to salute him as he left Welton Academy in bittersweet triumph? Remember his approach to education — inspiring his students to “seize the day,” love words and poetry, read deeply, think courageously, cultivate their individuality, and live lives of conviction and purpose?
Sure you do. But maybe you don’t remember the other teacher featured in the film, a Latin teacher named McAllister, who served as a cynical foil to Keating’s romantic liberalism. He was, in fact, in many ways, the Anti-Keating. The scenes in his classroom consisted of him padding back and forth like a big caged cat in front of his blackboard with pointer at the ready, drilling Latin verbs into his students with metronomic precision. He was the old-school realist who warned Keating not to expect too much from his adolescent charges.
Now, obviously neither of these teachers is real, and their contrasting styles and beliefs could hardly be made more stark. Yet despite its often overdone and heavy-handed Hollywood way, “Dead Poets” seems entirely relevant in the current debate about teachers and testing.
McAllister, unfairly or not, is portrayed as one who believes that his function as a teacher is to ensure the competency (or “proficiency,” take your pick) of his students in the subject at hand, not to sell them pipe dreams of what they might become.
For Keating, competency is little more than a stepping-stone. His function as a teacher who also challenges and inspires his students transforms competency from an end to a beginning, from a product to a tool. To Keating, students don’t read and write not only to perform well on a test; they also read and write as way to discover a wider world and a deeper, more enlightened self.
CSAP tests, however, have deigned to omit the section on the “enlightened self.” Like McAllister, the Colorado Student Assessment Program is all about competency. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for either incompetency or teachers who produce or accept it in their students. It’s just that all this obsession with standardized testing has led to a rather serious case of Competence Syndrome, which often confuses the competent with the educated.
If competence is the ultimate goal of a chosen field, then Peter Forsberg would still be playing for the Avs, the Beatles would never have moved beyond “Please, Please Me,” and Fitzgerald’s Gatsby probably wouldn’t have been all that great.
But this equating of competence with education has other unintended consequences, I believe, for both teachers and students.
Will teachers think they are successful teachers if their students are proven competent through testing and stop their teaching at that level? Will they then stifle whatever is left of their inner Keating? Will they, like McAllister, go over to the dark side of “drill baby drill”?
The students are perhaps even more vulnerable to the competence-education confusion. Do they believe that CSAP tests and the like are proof or verification of their education? Will they “learn” that competence is good enough? Will they lose they natural curiousity and love of learning? Will their dreams of college glory be attenuated there by too much remediation and a surprising indifference to their test-verified competence?
Now, we all know that the Keatings of this world are few, and there are even fewer of us with the manic energy of Robin Williams, who was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal. Nonetheless, I believe that the most important relationship in education isn’t the one between a student and his test score or a student’s test score and his teacher, but between a student and his teacher. The foundations of great teaching — mutual respect, rapport, passion for and expertise in the subject matter — raise the classroom above the level of competence and give education a life beyond the standardized test.
Why not focus our efforts and dollars on recruiting, respecting and retaining the next generation of Keatings instead of spending them on testing that has done little to move our students’ competence forward and much to retard their pursuit and appreciation of a life of the mind?
Mark Moe (brktrt_80231@ ) is a retired English teacher.
